第 10 页

No one spoke of the incident the next day, although Wladek's eyes rarely left the body of the dead man. It was the Baron's butler, Ludwik - one of the witnesses to the Baron's will, and his heritage - dead.

On the evening of the third day another train chugged into the station, a great steam locomotive pulling open freight cars, the floors strewn with straw and the word 'cattle' painted on the sides. Several cars were already full, full of humans, but from where Wladek could not judge, so hideously did their appearance resemble his own. He and his band were thrown together into one of the cars to begin the journey. After a wait of several more hours the train started to move out of the station, in a direction which Wladek judged, from the setting sun, to be eastward.

To every three carriages there was a guard sitting crosslegged on a roofed car. Throughout the interminable journey an occasional flurry of bullet shots from above demonstrated to Wladek the futility of any further thoughts of escape.

When the train stopped at Minsk, they were given their first proper meal: black bread, water, nuts, and more millet, and then the journey continued.

Sometimes they went for three days without seeing another station. Many of the reluctant travellers died of starvation and were thrown overboard from the moving train. And when the train did stop they would often wait for two days to allow another train going west use of the track. These trains which delayed their progress were inevitably full of soldiers, and it became obvious to Wladek that the troop trains had priority over all other transport. Escape was always uppermost in Wladek's mind, but three things prevented him from advancing that ambition. First, no one had yet succeeded; second, there was nothing but miles of wilderness on both sides of the track; and third, those who had survived the dungeons were now totally dependent on him to protect them. It was Wladek who organised their food and drink, and tried to give them all the will to live. He was the youngest and the last one still to believe in life.

At night, it became bitterly cold, often thirty degrees below zero, and they would all lie up against each other in a line on the carriage floor so that each body would keep the person next to him warm. Wladek would recite the Aeneid to himself while he tried to snatch some sleep. It was impossible to turn over unless everyone agreed, so Wladek would lie at the end and each hour, as near as he could judge by the changing of the guards, he would slap the side of the carriage, and they would all roll over and face the other way. One after the other, the bodies would turn like falling dominoes. Sometimes a body did not move - because it no longer could - and Wladek would be informed. He in turn would inform the guard and four of them would pick up the body and throw it over the side of the moving train. The guards would pump bullets into the head to be sure it was not someone hoping to escape.

Two hundred miles beyond Minsk, they arrived in the small town of Smolensk, where they received warm cabbage soup and black bread. Wladek was joined in his car by some new prisoners who spoke the same tongue as the guards.

Their leader seemed to be about the same age as Wladek. Wladek and his ten remaining companions, nine men and one woman, were immediately suspicious of the new arrivals, and they divided the carriage in half, with the two groups remaining apart for several days.

One night, while Wladek lay awake staring at the stars, trying to get warm, he watched the leader of the Smolenskis crawl towards the end man of his own line with a small piece of rope in his hand. He watched him slip it round the neck of Alfons, the Baron's first footman, who was sleeping.

Wladek knew if he moved too quickly, the boy would hear him and escape back to his own half of the carriage and the protection of his comrades, so he crawled slowly on his belly down the line of Polish bodies. Eyes stared at him as he passed, but nobody spoke. When he reached the end of the line, he leaped forward upon the aggressor, immediately waking everyone in the truck. Each faction shrank back to its own end of the carriage, with the exception of Alfons, who lay motionless in front of them.

The Smolenski leader was taller and more agile than Wladek, but it made little difference while the two were fighting on the floor. The struggle lasted for several minutes, with the guards laughing and taking bets as they watched the two gladiators. One guard, who was getting bored by the lack of blood, threw a bayonet into the middle of the car. Both boys scrambled for the shining blade with the Smolenski leader grabbing it first. The Smolenski band cheered their hero as he thrust the bayonet into the side of Wladek's leg, pulled the blood-covered steel back out and lunged again. On the second thrust the blade lodged firmly in the wooden floor of the jolting car next to Wladek's ear. As the Smolenski leader tried to wrench it free, Wladek kicked him in the groin with every ounce of energy he had left, and in throwing his adversary backwards released the bayonet. With a leap, Wladek grabbed the handle and jumped on top of the Smolenski, running the blade right into his mouth, The man gave out a shriek of agony that awoke the entire train. Wladek pulled the blade out, twisting it as he did so, and thrust it back into the Smolenski again and again, long after he had ceased to move. Wladek knelt over him, breathing heavily, and then picked up the body and threw it out of the carriage. He heard the thud as it hit the bank, and the shots that the guards pointlessly aimed af ter it.

Wladek limped towards Alfons, still lying motionless on the wooden boards, and knelt by his side shaking his lifeless body - his second witness dead. Who would now believe that he, Wladek, was the chosen heir to the Baron's fortune? Was there any purpose left in life? He collapsed to his knees. He picked up the bayonet with both hands, pointing the blade towards his stomach. Immediately a guard jumped down and wrested the weapon away from him.

'Oh no, you don't,' he grunted. 'We need the lively ones like you for the camps. You can't expect us to do all the work.'

Wladek buried his head in his hands, aware for the first time of an aching pain in his bayoneted leg. He had lost his inheritance and traded it to become the leader of a band of penniless Smolenskis.

The whole truck once again became his domain and he now had twenty prisoners to care for. He immediately split them up so that a Pole would always sleep next to a Smolenski, making it impossible for there to be any further warfare between the two groups.

Wladek spent a considerable part of his time learning their strange tongue, not realising for several days that it was actually Russian, so greatly did it differ from the classical Russian language taught him by the Baron, and then the real significance of the discovery dawned on him for the first time when he realised where the train was heading.

During the day Wladek used to take on two Smolenskis at a time to tutor him, and as soon as they were tired, he would take on two more, and so on until they were all exhausted.

Gradually he became able to converse easily with his new dependents. Some of them were Russian soldiers, exiled after repatriation for the crime of having been captured by the Germans. The rest were White Russians, farmers, miners, labourers, all bitterly hostile to the Revolution.

The train jolted on past terrain more barren than Wadek had ever seen before, and through towns of which he had never heard - Omsk, Novo Sibirsk, Krasnoyarsk - the names rang ominously in his ears. Finally, after three months and more than three thousand miles, they reached Irkutsk, where the railway track came to an abrupt end.

They were hustled off the train, fed, and issued with felt boots, jackets and heavy coats and although fights broke out for the warmest clothing, they still provided little protection from the ever intensifying cold.

Horseless wagons appeared, not unlike the one which had borne Wladek away from his castle, and long chains were thrown out. Then, to Wladek's disbelief and horror, the prisoners were cuffed to the chain by one hand, twenty-five pairs side by side on each chain. The trucks pulled the mass of prisoners along while the guards rode on the back. They marched like that for twelve hours, before being given a twohour rest, and then they marched again. After three days, Wladek thought he would die of cold and exhaustion, but once clear of populated areas they travelled only during the day and rested at night. A mobile field kitchen run by prisoners from the camp supplied turnip soup and bread at first light and then again at night. Wladek learned from these prisoners that conditions at the camp were even worse.

For the first week they were never unshackled from those chains, but later when there could be no thought of escape they were released at night to sleep, digging holes in the snow for warmth. Sometimes on good days they found a forest in which to bed down; luxury began to take strange forms. On and on they marched, past enormous lakes and across frozen rivers, ever northwards, into the face of viciously cold winds and deeper falls of snow. Wladek's injured leg gave him a constant dull pain, soon surpassed in intensity by the agony of frostbitten fingers and ears. There was no sign of life or food in all the expanse of whiteness, and Wladek knew that to attempt an escape at night could only mean slow death by starvation.

The old and the sick were starting to die, quietly at night, if they were lucky. The unlucky ones, unable to keep up the pace, were uncuffed from the chains and cast off to be left alone in the endless snow. Those who survived walked on, on, on, always towards the north, until Wladek lost all sense of time and was simply conscious of the inexorable tug of the chain, not even sure when he dug his hole in the snow to sleep at night that he would wake the next morning: those that didn't had dug their own grave.

After a trek of nine hundred miles, those who had survived were met by Ostyaks, nomads of the Russian steppes, in reindeer-drawn sleds. The trucks discharged their cargo and turned back. The prisoners, now chained to the sleds, were led on. A great blizzard forced them to halt for the greater part of two days and Wladek seized the opportunity to communicate with the young Ostyak to whose sled he was chained. Using classical Russian, with a Polish accent, he was understood only very imperfectly but he did discover that the Ostyaks hated the Russians of the south, who treated them almost as badly as they treated their captives. The Ostyaks were not unsympathetic to the sad prisoners with no future, the 'unfortunates' as they called them.

Nine days later, in the half light of the early Arctic winter night, they reached camp 201. Wladek would never have believed he could have been glad to see such a place : row upon row of wooden huts in the stark open space.

The huts, like the prisoners were numbered. Wladek's hut was 33. There was a small black stove in the middle of the room, and, projecting from the walls, tiered wooden bunks on which were hard straw mattresses and one thin blanket. Few of them managed to sleep at all that first night, and the groans and cries that came from but 33 were often louder than the howls of the wolves outside.

The next morning before the sun rose, they were woken by the sound of a hammer against an iron triangle. There was thick frost on both sides of the window and Wladek thought that he must surely die of the cold.

Breakfast in a freezing communal hall lasted for ten minutes and consisted of a bowl of lukewarm gniel, with pieces of rotten fish and a leaf of cabbage floating in it. The newcomers spat the fish bones out on the table while the more seasoned prisoners ate the bones and even the fishes' eyes.

After breakfast, they were allocated tasks. Wladek became a wood chopper.

He was taken seven miles through the featureless steppes intb a forest and ordered to cut a certain number of trees each day. The guard would leave him and his little group of six to themselves with their food ration, tasteless yellow magara porridge and bread. The guards had no fear of the prisoners attempting to escape, for it was over a thousand miles to the nearest town, even if you knew in which direction to head.

At the end of each day, the guard would return and count the number of logs of wood they had chopped; he informed the prisoners that if they failed to reach the required number, he would stop the group's food for the following day. But when he came back at seven in the evening to collect the reluctant woodsmen, it was already dark, and he could not always see exactly how many new logs they bad cut. Wladek taught the others in his team to spend the last part of the afternoon clearing the snow off the wood cut the previous day and lining it up with what they had chopped that day. It was a plan that always worked, and Wladek's group never lost a day's food. Sometimes they managed to return to the camp with a small piece of wood, tied to the inside of their legs, to put in the coal stove at night. Caution was required, for at least one of them was searched every time they left and entered. the camp, often having to remove one or both boots, and to stand there in the numbing snow. If they were caught with anything on them it meant three days without food.

As the weeks went by, Wladek's leg started to become very stiff and painful. He longed for the coldest days, when the temperature went down to forty below zero, and outside work was called off, even though the lost day would have to be made up on a free Sunday when they were normally allowed to lie on their bunks all day.

One evening when Wladek had been hauling logs across the waste, his leg began to throb unmercifully. When he looked at the scar caused by the Smolenski, he found that it had become puffy and shiny. That night, he showed the wound to a guard, who ordered him to report to the camp doctor before first light in the morning. Wladek sat up all night with his leg nearly touching the stove, surrounded by wet boots, but the heat was so feeble that it couldn't ease the pain.

The next morning Wladek rose an hour earlier than usual. If you had not seen the doctor before work was due to start, then you missed him until the next day. Wladek couldn't face another day of such intense pain. He reported to the doctor, giving his name and number. Pierre Dubien was a sympathetic old man, bald-headed, with a pronounced stoop, and Wladek thought he looked even older than the Baron. He inspected Wladek's leg without speaking.

'Will the wound be all right, doctor?' asked Wladek.

'You speak Russian?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Although you will always limp, young man, your leg will be good again.'